The present invention relates generally to cellular communications, and more particularly, to a method for multicast video delivery for 4G cellular networks.
Although wireless broadband technologies have evolved significantly over the past decade, they are still insufficient to support fast growing mobile traffic, especially due to the increasing popularity of mobile video applications. Wireless multicast, aiming to exploit the wireless broadcast advantage, is a viable approach to bridge the gap between the limited wireless networking capacity and the ever-increasing mobile video traffic demand.
The problem is how to efficiently multicast videos to a group of clients. The video is non-scalable and is encoded using traditional technologies such as MPEG4 and H.264. Different users are under different channel conditions.
Others have studied the wireless multicast problem with scalable video coding (i.e., multi-layered video), while still others have studied the multicast problem in WiFi networks where radio resources are not allocated by a central controller. There has already been developed a graceful video multicast scheme that requires modifying the video encoding and part of the channel coding using rateless coding.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method for multicast video delivery for 4G cellular networks that overcomes limitations of prior video delivery solutions.